Barcelona & Seattle

 “Gun City” directed by Dani de la Torre, 2018

This is a riveting story of the battle between mass anarchism and reactionaries in the city of Barcelona in 1921.  It is a preview to the later Spanish Civil War.  The factions here are laid-out.  The military, which wants to declare Martial Law. The police, led by a liberal but staffed by crooked, inept and violent thugs. The civilian government in Madrid, which is trying to forestall a coup and prevent any provocations, real or staged. The majority of anarchists, strong in the CNT labor movement, who are engaging in many tough strikes.  A small minority of anarchists who want to pick up the gun right away ‘for the revolution.’  A criminal ‘Mafia’ underground, which might have stolen the guns from a military train to sell to the highest bidder.  And a capitalist looking for weapons and enforcers.

Fighting strike-breakers in Barcelona

A mysterious detective arrives from Madrid and becomes part of the investigation to find the guns.  The factions clash, murders are committed, strikers and scabs fight pitched battles, and the guns are finally located.  The characters are an anarchist daughter that wavers between the factions, her father, leader of the anarchist movement in Barcelona and a young punk, yelling for revolution.  The mystery cop, a crooked police lieutenant and his vicious right-hand man form the police ‘Information Brigade.’ The criminals are headed by a manipulative night-club owner who deals with everyone for cash.  And a be-medaled military general making threats – a precursor to a future Franco.

The movie gives a partial picture of the labor strife in Spain in 1919-1923, centered on Barcelona, the most industrial city in Spain.  In 1919 the 8-hour day was won by the Canadenca general strike there. In 1923 there was a coup carried out by Primo de Rivera to stop the Left.  In 1936 the Spanish Civil War started, lasting until 1939 with the establishment of a fascist state under Franco and the defeat of anarchists, the CNT, Soviet-line Communists and communist POUMists who formed the base of the ‘Republican’ forces.

“How It Ends”directed by David Rosenthal, 2018

This film is an apocalyptic road picture, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Mad Max II, or Two-Lane Blacktop, but updated to the present U.S.  Through the whole picture the clueless principals wonder ‘what happened’ to cause the destruction of Seattle and possibly other west coast cities, along with the U.S. electrical grid and cell service.  The writers aren’t telling, which is how self-censorship works in the U.S. 

Getting gas on the northern plains

Ashes are falling over Washington State and Seattle with buildings destroyed in the city.  Fires are burning in the woods in the northern plains and along the roads.  There is a moving ash cloud.  Earthquakes rattle after a tsunami wave crashed into the west coast.  There could have been a possible nuclear explosion somewhere in the Pacific. There are volcanic eruptions in the west and heavy rain storms in South Dakota.  No logical connection seems to exist between all these things – yet they mirror real, individual events that have happened.  Are the writers trying to tell us something between the lines, afraid of actual clarity?  Or is it just disaster porn?

The two male principals, Ghost Dog Forest Whitaker, playing a tough, retired military type and Will, a newbie middle-class lawyer that has never handled a gun, set off from Chicago by Cadillac to rescue their daughter/wife, who is in Seattle.  The airports are all shut down so ...  apocalyptic road trip! That means driving Interstate 90 across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington State – with no working gas stations for nearly the whole way due to the power outage.  That is over 2,000 miles of freeway.  They have to scavenge or siphon gas and … of course they can! At 25 miles a gallon highway, that means 80 gallons.  The tank holds 19 gallons so they’d need more than 4 complete fill-ups to make it in ideal interstate conditions.  The conditions are not ideal, given dirt roads, indirect routes and some rough driving.  The rescue mission is not doable except in a film.

These two male rescuers meet the required amount of gun-toting criminals attempting to take their gas and car.  Guns out!  Fancy driving!  Also a tough, young Lakota girl who knows automobile repair; one nice family; the standard distressed white woman and a treacherous friend.  They get off I90 in Minnesota due to the criminals and try the backroads. They run into unexplained, blown-up military trains and terrible rain storms that crash lightening into everything, so they hide under a bridge.  Places are abandoned or heavily guarded by townspeople.  Smoke pillars on the horizons.

‘Luckily’ Will has a friend in South Dakota and a father in Idaho living along their path.  Ah, fiction.  Mr. Pollyanna Will always has faith that his pregnant wife will be okay – not dead - and everything else ‘will be ok.’ At any rate, the happy story is that they eventually escape to Canada ahead of a rolling ash cloud.  Canada seems to again be a safe-haven from various disasters in the U.S.A. The characters are cliché’s and the predictable cranky father-in-law / defensive son-in-law relationship ends on a bittersweet note.  It’s also a taste of city people going into the backlands, sort of a car version of that canoe trip in Deliverance.  No squealing here though.  Everybody’s got a gun, which even Will learns to use. 

I track certain apocalyptic and dystopian films and books. Perhaps this one will partly prepare you for the next climate emergency.  To the writers it’s all about 1 family, no one else. The ‘critics’ didn’t like it because the clichés never stop coming.  I find the film unable to deal with real disaster.  Its vagueness is ridiculous, as refraining from naming the cause is a typical cop-out in this genre.  The small-scope family angle is both debilitating and hinders a real social response to an ‘apocalypse.’  All we see is chaos and family.  How does it end? Given this disaster seems not to be exclusive to the U.S., Canada might be no better a refuge.  So it ends, as a film, poorly.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “World War Z, “ “The Road” (McCarthy); “Furious Feminisms – Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road,” “We’re Doomed.  Now What?” “Cloud Atlas,” “Living in the End Times” (Zizek); “How Will Capitalism End?” “Blade Runner – 2049,” “Hothouse Utopia,” “People’s Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” (Atwood); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick); “Planet of the Apes,” (3 movies); American War.”     

The Kultur Kommissar

November 7, 2023 / Happy Bolshevik Revolution Day!